The Topine Trilogy

In March of 2005, bookish music lover and aspiring geologist Dave Hanson sits alone in the corner of his high school cafeteria and listens to the booming dance music of the Topine High School Spring Dance thumping away in the gymnasium across the hallway. Moments later, he is greeted by the sound of an unexpected voice: it is Jessica Cummings, one of the most beautiful and popular girls in the entire school. What follows is a raunchy, playful, and intimate conversation between two people who face wildly different futures despite their identical stages of life. Through lively discussions about dead family members, a secret list ranking the most attractive of male classmates in the school, and a religious transgression committed in a church bathroom, Dave and Jess begin to build a burgeoning friendship amid this transitory period in their lives. Though Dave does not know it at the time, this conversation will resonate over the next two decades of his life, coloring his behavior during a pair of equally important conversations many years in the future.

Insightful, sharp, and written with the immediacy of a dramatic stage play, The Topine Trilogy is a decades-long exploration of how the intimate conversations we have can set our lives on a path we never expected to take.



"An autofiction novel so terrible it destroys subjective consciousness."

- Katie Frank, editor of Hobart

"With The Topine Trilogy, Steve Gergley extends the dialogue-centric, elseworlds mundanity of Episode 3328: Ian Sharp into a portrait of suburban male isolation in triptych, tracking one hapless man's inability to seal the deal-even with a gun to his head-across decades of his life. Gergley's straightforward writing belies a delicate balancing act, riding a wavering line between the utterly believable and heightened absurdity with surprising confidence. Tense, strange, oddly funny and devastatingly honest, The Topine Trilogy is an essential entry in Gergley's burgeoning bibliography and required reading for any losers looking to take a walk on the wild side."

- Mark Wadley, Editor of Bruiser Magazine